Newlyweds identified as pair who targeted Indonesian cathedral

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 29 March 2021

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JAKARTA - Indonesian authorities identified a newly married couple with suspected militant links as the attackers who used a pressure cooker to blow themselves up outside a Roman Catholic cathedral during Palm Sunday Mass.

The attack wounded 20 people, including four church guards, and broke windows at the church and nearby buildings in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province.

The couple married six months ago and police were still investigating at their house in Makassar, National Police spokesperson Argo Yuwono said.

“Investigations are still being carried out including uncovering other perpetrators,” Mr Yuwono said in a statement.

Police identified the couple only by their initials, L and his wife, YSF.

Neighbours of the couple identified the man as Lukman and his wife as Dewi, who were between 23 and 26 years old.

The attackers detonated their bombs when they were confronted by guards outside the church.

The pressure cooker bombs contained high explosive materials and nails to increase the harm to victims, said Makassar city police chief Witnu Urip Laksana.

Police carried out DNA tests from relatives to determine the attackers’ identities, Mr Laksana said.

The couple were believed to have been members of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, which has pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State group and carried out a series of suicide bombings in Indonesia.

They included the 2016 Starbucks attack in Jakarta, which killed four civilians and four militants; an attack on a bus terminal in the capital that killed three police officers; and an attack on a church in Kalimantan that killed a two-year-old girl a year later.

Several other children suffered serious burns from the Kalimantan attack.

Indonesia’s last major attack was in May 2018, when two families carried out suicide bombings on churches in Surabaya, killing a dozen people including two young girls whose parents had involved them in one of the attacks.

Police said the father was the leader of a local affiliate of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah.

One of the attackers in Makassar was believed to have links to a 2019 suicide attack that killed 23 people at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Cathedral in the Philippine province of Sulu, Indonesian National Police Chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo said.

He said the two attackers were linked to a group of suspected militants arrested in Makassar on January 6, when a police counter-terrorism squad shot and killed two suspected militants and arrested 19 others.

The two men who were killed were being sought for their alleged role in the Philippine attack.

Mr Prabowo said police on Sunday arrested four suspected militants believed to have links with the attackers in a raid in Bima, a city on Sumbawa island in West Nusa Tenggara province.

Local media reports said Indonesia’s elite police counter-terrorism squad, known as Densus 88, made arrests in several places on Monday, including in Jakarta and its satellite city of Bekasi.

The attack a week before Easter in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation came as the country was on high alert following December’s arrest of the leader of the Southeast Asian militant group, Jemaah Islamiyah, which has been designated a terror group by many nations.

President Joko Widodo condemned Sunday’s attack and said it has nothing to do with any religion as all religions would not tolerate any kind of terrorism.

He ordered police to “thoroughly investigate the networks of the perpetrators and hunt them to the roots”.

More than 90 killed in Myanmar in one of bloodiest days of protests

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 27 March 2021

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YANGON - Security forces killed more than 90 people across Myanmar on Saturday in one of the bloodiest days of protests since a military coup last month, news reports and witnesses said.

The lethal crackdown came on Armed Forces Day. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader, said during a parade in the capital Naypyitaw to mark the event that the military would protect the people and strive for democracy.

State television had said on Friday that protesters risked being shot “in the head and back”. Despite this, demonstrators against the Feb. 1 coup came out on the streets of Yangon, Mandalay and other towns.

The Myanmar Now news portal said 91 people were killed across the country by security forces.

A boy reported by local media to be as young as five was among at least 29 people killed in Mandalay. At least 24 people were killed in Yangon, Myanmar Now said.

“Today is a day of shame for the armed forces,” Dr. Sasa, a spokesman for CRPH, an anti-junta group set up by deposed lawmakers, told an online forum.

Meanwhile, one of Myanmar’s two dozen ethnic armed groups, the Karen National Union, said it had overrun an army post near the Thai border, killing 10 people - including a lieutenant colonel - and losing one of its own fighters.

A military spokesman did not respond to calls seeking comment on the killings by security forces or the insurgent attack on its post.

“They are killing us like birds or chickens, even in our homes,” said Thu Ya Zaw in the central town of Myingyan, where at least two protesters were killed. “We will keep protesting regardless... We must fight until the junta falls.”

The deaths on Saturday would take the number of civilians reported killed since the coup to well over 400.

“This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour,” the EU delegation to Myanmar said. “The killing of unarmed civilians, including children, are indefensible acts.”

News reports said there were deaths in the central Sagaing region, Lashio in the east, in the Bago region, near Yangon, and elsewhere. A one-year-old baby was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet.

In Naypyitaw, Min Aung Hlaing reiterated a promise to hold elections, without giving any time-frame.

“The army seeks to join hands with the entire nation to safeguard democracy,” he said in a live broadcast on state television. “Violent acts that affect stability and security in order to make demands are inappropriate.”

The military has said it took power because November elections won by Aung San Suu Kyi’s party were fraudulent, an assertion dismissed by the country’s election commission.

Suu Kyi, the elected leader and the country’s most popular civilian politician, remains in detention at an undisclosed location. Many other figures in her party are also being held in custody.

RUSSIA ‘A TRUE FRIEND’

In its warning on Friday evening, state television said protesters were “in danger of getting shot to the head and back”. It did not specifically say security forces had been given shoot-to-kill orders and the junta has previously suggested some fatal shootings have come from within the crowds.

International pressure on the junta increased this week with new U.S. and European sanctions. But Russia’s deputy defence minister Alexander Fomin attended the parade in Naypyitaw, having met senior junta leaders a day earlier.

“Russia is a true friend,” Min Aung Hlaing said.

Diplomats said eight countries - Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand - sent representatives, but Russia was the only one to send a minister.

Support from Russia and China, which has also refrained from criticism, is important for the junta as those two countries are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and can block potential U.N. actions.

Armed Forces Day commemorates the start of the resistance to Japanese occupation in 1945 that was orchestrated by Suu Kyi’s father, the founder of the military.

Gunshots hit the U.S. cultural centre in Yangon on Saturday, but nobody was hurt and the incident was being investigated, U.S. Embassy spokesperson Aryani Manring said.

Protesters have taken to the streets almost daily since the coup that derailed Myanmar’s slow transition to democracy.

General Yawd Serk, chair of the Restoration Council of Shan State/Shan State Army - South, one of the ethnic armies in the country, told Reuters in neighbouring Thailand:”If they continue to shoot at protesters and bully the people, I think all the ethnic groups would not just stand by and do nothing.”

Author and historian Thant Myint-U wrote on Twitter: “A failed state in Myanmar has the potential to draw in all the big powers - including the US, China, India, Russia, and Japan - in a way that could lead to a serious international crisis (as well as an even greater catastrophe in Myanmar itself)”.

Thai PM sprays reporters with disinfectant

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 10 March 2021

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BANGKOK - Politicians are often accused of sanitising the news. On Tuesday, Thailand’s prime minister sanitised members of the press.

After fielding a slew of questions from journalists at his weekly news conference in Bangkok, the famously mercurial Prayuth Chan-ocha sprayed back — with disinfectant.

Riled by a final question about a possible Cabinet reshuffle, he told reporters to mind their own business, then grabbed a container of alcohol mist and doused the front row before sauntering off.

The quick-tempered former army commander, who overthrew the elected government in a 2014 coup, is known for his unpredictable behaviour. In the past, he's spoken to a media scrum while fondling the ear of one of the reporters and flung a banana peel at camera operators.

After an event in 2018 he declined to speak to the media, and instead set up a life-size cutout of himself. “Ask this guy,” he said and walked away.